Useful Without a Wage

It is twenty past nine on a Tuesday and Curtis is standing in his own front yard with his hands hanging at his sides.

The toolbox is open on the tailgate where he left it, because he went out there at seven to look for the quarter inch driver and got as far as opening the lid. Everything in it works. The top drawer sticks unless you lift it a half inch first, and he has known that trick for thirty years and has never once fixed it, which he would tell you is the sign of a man who was always busy.

Forty one years. Two plants, a stretch on his own, and eleven years at the end running a crew of six. He was good. That is not a boast, it is just true, and the men he trained are still working and one of them named a boy after him.

And now it is Tuesday, and he is in the yard, and there is nothing wrong.

Here is the shape of the trouble, and he would not be able to lay it out for you like this, but you can see it if you watch him for ten minutes. Every idea that comes to him arrives with a second half attached, and the second half kills it before it lands. He thinks, I could go over and look at that gate at the Meyers place, it has dragged since last spring. And then, immediately, in the same breath, in a voice as automatic as breathing: and who is paying you for that.

It is not greed. Get that straight, because it matters. Curtis would not take a dime off Marlene Meyer and would be offended if she offered. It is not about the money at all. It is that for forty one years, a job with a wage on it was how a man knew a thing was worth doing, and the wage was not the point but it was the proof. It said somebody wanted this. It said this was needed. Take that off, and his hands are still good, and his tools are still good, and he genuinely cannot tell whether anything he does now counts.

So the toolbox sits open on the tailgate and he stands there, and by half past nine he goes in and puts the kettle on, and that is Tuesday.

You are the one in the yard.

Maybe you did not run a crew. Maybe it was a desk, or a route, or thirty years of somebody else's kitchen. Whatever it was, it came with a shape and the shape told you it mattered, and now the shape is gone. And people keep saying enjoy yourself, you have earned it, and you cannot make them understand that the problem is not boredom. The problem is that you no longer know what your hands are for.

Let me tell you what I am not going to do. I am not going to hand you a project list, and I am not putting you on a schedule. There is nothing in this you have to keep up. What I want to do is read you one line and let it change the address on the envelope.

Who the work goes to

Paul writes a line to people in Colossae whose work came with no wage on it whatsoever. Not a small one. None.

He does not tell them the work is meaningless. He does not tell them to feel better about it either. He changes one thing, and the one thing he changes is the address.

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for menColossians 3:23

Read it as a man with a toolbox. The verse does not say whatever gets paid for. It says whatever you do. And then it names who the work is done unto, which is the part your whole life has been quietly answering wrong, not out of rebellion but because for forty one years the answer came printed on a stub.

This is not a job description I am writing for you. Colossians 3 is where it stands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who changes the address on a Tuesday morning: you have work that is received by the Lord Himself the moment your hands move, and the receiving does not wait on anyone else to want it or to say what it was worth.

Now think about what that does to the second half of every sentence in your head. Who is paying you for that. It turns out the question was never a question about money. It was a question about whether the thing was needed, and it went looking for a wage because that is the only proof a working life ever handed you. The verse answers the real question and leaves the fake one alone. Needed by whom, and received by whom. Those have an answer and the answer is a Person.

And notice He does not need the work. That is the difference between the Lord and a plant. A plant needs output. He is not short of anything, and He receives what you do anyway, the way a father keeps a crooked shelf his boy made and would not trade it for a good one.

There is no clause in His word setting a rate on a man's usefulness, and the Holy Spirit has never once counted it that way: you were never worth what somebody paid you, not on your best year and not on your last one, and Colossians 3 is where the whole measure gets moved off the stub and onto the Lord.

It was laid out before you got here

Here is the second thing, and it takes the pressure off inventing something.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:10

Prepared beforehand. Not assigned to you at a meeting. Not thought up by you in a yard at twenty past nine. Laid out in advance, by God, and the verb for how a man gets into them is walk, which is the least dramatic word in the language and I think that is deliberate.

You do not have to see the whole of it. A man walking does not need the road mapped, he needs the next twenty feet, and the next twenty feet of yours is probably within sight of the spot where that toolbox is sitting.

That is God's own valuation and not mine, recorded in Ephesians 2, and the same Spirit who moved the man who wrote it is saying it over a full toolbox in a quiet yard: this is yours already, prepared and waiting, and it was prepared before you retired and before you were hired and before you were born.

And hear me on the other side of that, because I have seen this land wrong on good men. Nothing here is a new job. There is no quota. A week can go by with those hands still, and nothing has failed and no freedom has been wasted, and God does not stand at the end of a Tuesday with a clipboard. A man who cannot name his direction yet is not behind. He is a man on a road, and the road was prepared by Someone who is not in a hurry.

One thing plainly, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If not knowing what your hands are for has gone somewhere heavier, if there is a thought coming around that the world would keep turning fine without you in it, tell one human being today, and reach the crisis line where you live if there is any danger to you at all. That thought is a liar and it should not be sat with alone, and telling somebody is one of the ordinary things a free man does.